I've been at it in fists and starts since sometime in November? (or maybe it was December). Basically, whenever "the kids" were all around - we'd play a bit of this. In the end it was just two of us who finished it.
What I found interesting is how little the "modern" additions (more moves and combos, an upgrade progression system for each character, collectibles and challenges for each level) to the brawler style seemed to matter. At least to us. Sure, it was nice to level up and get stronger - but it wasn't something we were chasing, it just happened as we played. I never paid too much attention to the combos - and I'm guessing if we were playing on the harder difficulty levels this might have been different...we just sort of played through on basic, definitely lost lives, but were still able to pull through. The collectibles were fun, and we did go back an replay a few levels to pick them up. But, they didn't seem to add too much to our experience of the game...
What DID feel good - and I recognized as being a "modern" addition - where all the fun animations and little tidbits in levels. Quite a few were gags and such - and it made the experience such that I enjoyed paying attention to what was going on in the different scenes and such. So, instead of the game having three times as many enemies/enemy types - it just added new/bespoke to the level animations (e.g. regular enemy comes out of a store eating an ice cream) that were fun to watch. It made the game feel like it had more depth. This isn't a knock on the older/original games at all, it's just an "art budget" sort of thing. What do you do when you want to do something that really closely resembles an old game (in style and gameplay) but can do it with current tech? Go for the subtle improvements - like better animations (more frames? more resolution, but still pixel-based looking).
Ok...it's time to move on!
I did at least win a battle on one of the higher difficulties and...maybe I won't quite uninstall it just yet. I was just getting started on the meta-progression as well, and there are lots of new cards to unlock (in the meta-progression). So...we'll see.
It was a game changer for me to realize that you could move your traps around - this is a huge help for certain bosses as well as the 3rd boss levels where the layout often changes.
I've also gotten better at the game in the sense that I'm really stingy now in terms of picking up new cards. There are lots of cool 4 mana cards, but in practice you rarely get to play them. If you're lucky you can add some inscriptions to them to make them cheaper - but you can't really count on that for several 4-cost cards. So, I now pick up one, two at the most...and try to make the most from there.
This game has such a sense of humor - it's subtle - and generally involves characters saying dumb stuff or being put in dumb situations. There's a side quest where you get bumped into by some ruffians who try to shake you down, you then beat them up (assuming you choose not to pay). I've run into them twice already!
It's these random side story quests I've enjoyed the most. One involved a buxom woman who comes on to you a lot, only for you to get drugged and robbed in a bar! Well, I later ran across the bar, beat up the bartender and...sort of finished the quest. Not sort of, it counted as finishing it! (with trophy award and all).
There's been a few of those quests where you do something, and then, later on you get the narrative resolution. It's an interesting structure that seems fresh - rather than having the quest always "active" here it just resolves later as a result of your wandering around. That being said I did learn what the "!" on the map meant (generally it's for quest stuff that's active).
The game's been a neat introduction to the franchise for me, and at 12 hours in, I don't think I'll be continuing to play mostly because I've got a drawer full of other PS4 games I need to get to (I've stopped buying PS4 games for a while - so it's all backlog now, and it's very very slowly getting smaller)
I also learned where to make use of all these locker keys I'd been finding - and opened a bunch of lockers (it's kind of strange to think that ALL of keys to the lockers have been lost by their owners) for prizes and treats.
Perhaps the strangest thing about this entire game is that the protagonist - Kazuma Kiryu - for all his anger and violence, basically spends most of his time fighting random people that attack him while trying to do nice things for others! I've been trying to find a replacement for the RC racer guy who can't get married because he's failed the full-time RC racer commentator interview and really needs full time job but can't quit before there's a replacement. I spent some time helping a woman sell matchboxes (with matches) because she wanted to get a gift for her paramour, but she's really poor (and perhaps a bit lazy) and her parents make the matches out of their apartment... Also the poor old man who's shivering and just needs a cloak (got him that, he gave me a pair of glasses, that then helped someone else, and so on). He's a friendly neighborhood spider-man without any superpowers except for mean fists and kicks.
As for how the story will play out? Well, one of the women I was looking for (who presumably stole the yakuza's nest egg of a billion yen) turned up dead. Drowned. Cement to weigh down the body and all. Pretty dark and tragic, especially as I'm trying to protect her daughter who has some sort of pendant that everyone seems to want. There's too many characters and ties (families) for me to keep it all straight, but it's the daily running around that's had me most engaged with the game to be honest.
You probably have as well - most of the (recent? current?) ones show a king in trouble and you have to solve a match-3 puzzle to rescue/save him. There's lots of different scenarios and they involve things like making matches along the way such that water flows in order to put out a fire.
To my surprise, the king-saving levels DO appear in the main game, but pretty rarely - every 25 or so regular levels you get a bonus one - which is a king level (I think they're called "King's Nightmare levels"). My guess is that they were added as a response to the advertising and the trouble that Playrix was getting into for having ads featuring gameplay that is not in the game. It'll be interesting to see how that whole part of of the industry evolves over the next few years - my guess, from messages I've seen on twitter (added by twitter) that flag those ads as not representative of gameplay, that we're seeing a bit of a tide change in that.
Anyways.
The main game is a straight up match-3, the longer you play (I made it to level 195 or so) the more variations you se in terms of things that get in the way of clearing a level, and it is super, super slick and fun and engaging. The powerups are pretty neat and the more you play the more you learn how to best use them to clear levels. And there are clans and events and everything is geared towards getting you to play for longer and longer. And, I did. It was super easy to get sucked in a to play an hour when you were just thinking of a quick match.
It is really good at this. A lot of it is because of the events - here's an event where you need to clear more levels faster than anyone else, here's another where you need to do a lot of level clears within 24hrs, and so on. There are so many of them and, I got to see a few weeks worth, they're varied and fun.
I've decided to go "cold turkey" after writing this mostly because I see how compelling and easy it is to get stuck in the game. Also, because there's a reward I think is a borderline dark pattern I find annoying. As you participate in events and so on you often win a reward that give you unlimited boosters of a kind (one free booster as you start a level) for a certain amount of time. Say, 30 minutes. The annoying part is that as soon as you win it, it unlocks and is activated. So, if you win it as you were planning on winding down and stopping play, too bad, you've wasted 30 minutes of that booster. I would much rather you get it and could choose when to activate it (like, when you're planning on playing for the next 30 minutes). I understand why it was implemented the way it is - it incentivizes continued play - and I think that's a bit manipulative, thus borderline dark pattern. I'd have to think about it a bit more to see if it really is dark - but I can say that I didn't like it, so I'm "voting" with my feet and uninstalling the game.
